AMD unveils its own CPU recommendations for Oculus VR

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Earlier this week, Oculus opened pre-orders for systems and configurations that it believes will deliver an acceptable VR experience. Overall, it’s probably best if consumers hold off on pre-ordering VR equipment — but since we’ve spent most of our time discussing the GPU side of the equation, the CPU deserves some love as well.

Jason Evangelho of Forbes sat down with AMD to talk about its processor support for VR and whether the company’s FX and APU families can drive headsets like the Oculus Rift. The good news is, they absolutely can, even if the current version of the Oculus hardware tester claims otherwise.

Originally, AMD told Forbes that there were a variety of AMD FX processors that could handle VR, as well as some of the highest-clocked APU processors. The company has since walked back its APU claims, however, and is now saying that only the FX chips have been validated. If you have an eight-core or six-core AMD CPU with a base clock no lower than 3.9GHz, you should be good to go with VR.

The fact that AMD is still validating VR on its APUs doesn’t mean those chips can’t handle the technology, but it may be difficult for them to do so. Even AMD’s upcoming A10-7890K, with a supposed 4.1GHz base clock and 4.3GHz boost clock isn’t all that powerful compared to Intel’s Core family. Since AMD CPUs can’t match the single-threaded performance of Intel chips, which is why AMD positions its multi-core offerings against Intel processors with a lower core count. According to Oculus’ recommendations, the minimum Intel chip you should use is a Core i5-4590. That’s a 3.3GHz quad-core with a 3.7GHz Turbo clock, 6MB of L2 cache, and no Hyper-Threading.

AMD’s six and eight-core processors leverage multi-threading to counter Intel’s strong single-thread performance, but a quad-core APU only has four threads to work with and can’t match an i5, core-for-core.

If AMD does manage to validate its APUs, it could mean that we’ll see broader compatibility than Oculus is currently recommending. If a quad-core APU can handle VR, older CPUs ought to be able to do so as well. Heck, we may even see some Nehalem-era hardware compatible, though I don’t know how far we can push that particular envelope. And of course, it’ll be important to test hardware from both companies to make sure older chips can actually handle the workload. VR support for AMD could wind up depending on DX12 support, too, since DX12 relieves pressure on CPU architectures.

I suspect we will find that the Intel Core i5-4590 was a very robust minimum recommendation — and to be fair, that’s the kind of minimum recommendation we like. I’m sure at some point, somebody will write a demo that lets you use VR on an old AMD K6 or a TRS-80 — hackers tend to be nuts like that.

And that’s actually going to be an important question. How does DX12 play into VR on the respective platforms? What’s the situation like there?

Daniel Glass

In theory at least DX12 will cut overall overhead significantly while using beefier cores up to the game’s capability, so if anything DX12 titles will be more effective on minimum spec hardware. Unlike Vulkan, DX12 simply sees available thread time as a broad resource it can use, while Vulkan seems to optimize more for the lower end AMD APUs.

Sweetie

Ashes posted better results on a 3.5 GHz i3 under DX12 than on a 4.0 GHz 8 core FX. That is worrisome. It suggests that DX12 will still enable engines to target dual cores and not leverage chips with more cores efficiently.

And, games like Deserts of Kharak and Fallout 4 are already taking advantage of FX chips.

I’m less concerned with whether DX12 is better on AMD vs. Intel than if it helps AMD be competitive with Intel. All else equal, I suspect people will prefer Core i3 / i5. But if it helps AMD fans make better use of their hardware, that’s still a win. Hopefully Zen will give AMD more opportunity to even the odds.

Corey

With DX12 it makes it easier to design for specific hardware. The thing you have to think of is a lot of people out there have older computers. Mine has components that are more than 3 years old. I mean it is a 2600k 16GB RAM and a R9 290 and is ageing gracefully but I would argue a lot of people have “cheap” PC’s. Another thing is, regardless of API it is still easier to program for less cores that are more powerful. The per core difference is incredible between even the i3’s and the FX 8350’s. Sure over all the 8350’s can almost match a Skylake i5 provided you can utilise all 8 cores, but per core strength geeze it isn’t even comparable. Ashes look great but proper multithread or at least FX chip optimisations might not be in yet. Otherwise yeah it will depend on how the engine is made.

Katana Man

You got all that from doom 4 benchmark? Also not written in vulkan but opengl actually.

Adrian Bobek

Doesn’t really matter. Without talking about the hardwares it is super important for the VR to use DX12/Vulkan, because the DX11 bind&draw model is too uncontrollable for the apps. With the explicit APIs it is possible to build the draws in the right threads and submit these in the perfect time.

Sweetie

The 8 core chips will likely work significantly better due to the fourth FPU unit and more cache (in comparison with the chip like 6300). Best deal right now is $100 8320E and $40 off a board if you are near a Micro Center. Avoid the APUs. They’re weaker. The 8320E will easily reach 4.3 GHz on a tower air cooler and higher with better cooling. (Disable APM to prevent TDP throttling.)

Suros

I’m really hoping that AMD’s Zen microarch is able to compete more closely with Skylake in single core stuff. It would really get competition rolling again.

Sweetie

If all you need is a 3.9 GHz six core FX then it seems the specs aren’t demanding enough to even need Zen. An 8 core FX running at 4.5 or 4.6 is quite a bit more potent than a six core at 3.9, especially if you can use all the cores.

My concern is that AMD is being too lenient with minimum frame rates with the 3.9 six core FX minimum spec. We’ll see.

Suros

Thing is, core frequency is not a measure of performance. I once had a Phenom II X4 945 running at 3GHz that performed on par with an FX-4170 at 4.2GHz. Upon seeing that, I was pretty disappointed with the FX line and grabbed an i5-4670k which blew them both away at 3.4GHz.

Like I said, I want single AMD cores to actually compete again rather than relying on the ability to run more threads. All of the FX chips have made me lose a lot of respect and Zen could make or break them.

Sweetie

It is a measure of performance when comparing the same architecture. Phenom is not faster than Piledriver in all benchmarks. In fact in most it’s slower.

Joel Hruska

That’s true, in point of fact. There are some tests where the X6 1100T was faster than the FX-8350, but not that many.

I never mentioned Piledriver. Thing is though, the changes that were made between Bulldozer and Piledriver weren’t especially large. They were just small improvements of the same idea. In the stuff I do each day, I usually only need to run 2 major threads at a time. No AMD processor on the market right now would be able to compete with an Intel processor for those types of workloads. A lack of competition is a real problem as the current leader has very little reason to leap forward.

Joel Hruska

“I never mentioned Piledriver.”

True, you didn’t. I expect he referred to it because PD has been on the market for so long, it’s now the default people assume when thinking about the BD family. And I doubt it would’ve changed your comparison much in any case; as you’ve said, PD puts on a little more frequency and a touch more perf, but doesn’t really reinvent the wheel.

I’m actually working on a story that addresses the latter half of your point, though. Intel’s failure to leap forward has nothing to do with a lack of competition, and everything to do with having hit certain limitations within the laws of physics. More on this soon.

Suros

I too suspect that silicon is nearing the end of its capabilities. We’re going to need a better semiconductor soon that can handle more juice or come up with some new way to make use of it.

VR is the next big thing, the next 2 years will see all nerds turn to their screens and say “nah”, I live in VR now, the headset wearing will not be allowed at the dinner table though :)

Prat

Unless the nerd in the house is the dad! :O :D

Starglider

My GOD adverts on here are mental! Wanting some more money I see… Adblock, right click and block the containers.

Prat

Yes, how DARE they want to fund themselves for providing us with media.

AS118

Nothing wrong with trying to make money, but there is such a thing as ads so obnoxious that it makes adblock look appealing, or that just drive people away from the site, adblock or no.

I don’t use adblock myself, but when sites spam me with too many obtrusive ads, I just leave.

Wussupi83

Well first you get the ads with the girls with the big ta-tas and exposed underwear – then when you’ve been served enough of those you get the testosterone and male enhancement ads because you’ve overdid it on the scandalous click bait sexy girl ads and you need a “pick me up” – then you get served the scandalous lady ads again and lose interest in real women – then when you’re single and impotent you get the dating and anti-depressant ads. It’s really a genius system.

XenoSilvano

Humn… I do not get any of those sort of ads when i come here.

Come to think of it, when you consider that these ads are usually targeted to each individual makes me question what sort of site that you visit often.

Wussupi83

If you tell me taboola serves you meaningful ads it makes me question if you actually use the internet.

vladx

You sure love some porn…

Prat

Personally, I don’t get any ads unless a site makes a plea about them needing the money, then I turn my ad blocker off for them.

they run an article about adblocker software – which will help you no end :)
get the Ublock addon – kills so much useless web content, that I don’t know how I used to live without it.

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Starglider

Yes. nothing wrong with trying to make money, but WOA, not seen ads this obtrusive on many sites I look at. I can’t help but give adblock a vote up for filling the page with all this. I’ve even gone into hosts file and added a few domains to stop the 1/2 screen scroll down on this website.

Starglider

I just turned adblock off, a full page at 1440p of ads just to get back to here. Just no lol.

SilentGal

Linking to forbes should be a no no. That site runs malware and has been getting removed from some news sites because of it infecting computers.

Anthony8989

Lol they don’t even use their FX processors in the rigs they debut their GPUs in.

Sweetie

They aren’t so bad, though, if you’re running a game that uses all the cores, like Deserts of Kharak or Fallout 4. They key is to get them to 4.5 or above.

Anthony8989

Yeah the 8350 and up are decent cpus , it’s just kind of embarrassing for the company to use their competitors platform because their own can’t provide the best results.

Sweetie

Not given AMD’s budget and their lack of foundries. If the playing field were even close to level then it would be embarrassing.

Anthony8989

Subjectively, AMD has been mismanaged for years . Conversely, Intel is a bastard company that will stop at nothing to maintain its monopoly.
All that aside , you’d think a highly binned FX9590 liquid cooled and OC’d might substitute an i7 – at least in gaming scenarios. But nah. i7 > AMD.

Sweetie

There are gaming scenarios where an overclocked FX beats a $1000 Haswell 8 core.

ronch

Well, I absolutely love my FX-8350 but I know what it is and what it isn’t. And it’s a good thing too that I mostly play old titles like System Shock 2 and Thief 1 & 2, while relatively newer games like Thef 4 and Battlefield 3/4 still play very nicely on it. By the time VR tech becomes more mature and more games and apps are out I hope to upgrade to Zen (as with everyone I’m hoping it’ll be very compelling) or a Core i7. That is, of course, assuming VR is worth it. We shall see.

vladx

Yeah right AMD, nice try. Have fun when AMD users will come knocking at your door because the bottleneck will hit them hard…

Mike Pengelly

This speaks more towards the poor programming on the part of VR Game Designers and oculus its self. A processor that does multi threaded better than single thread applications should win in this world all the time, its the programmers inability to make game engines and games multithreaded that is troubling. It’s like setting up a factory so one person has to build and do everything to a product instead of an assembly line of people creating a product. Four or eight people working together will get more done faster than 4 or 8 people all working independently.

Joel Hruska

“A processor that does multi threaded better than single thread applications should win in this world all the time”

This cannot be factually true.

AMD’s Bulldozer / Piledriver / Steamroller / Excavator family are all *less* efficient at scaling across multiple threads than conventional multi-core designs. The CPU pays a penalty for sharing architectural resources. In the first Bulldozer chips, an eight-core Bulldozer scales about 80% as well as a six-core Thuban.

AMD eventually reduced the size of this penalty from 20% to 10%, but it never eliminated it.

Regardless of that, you can’t have more than 100% scaling in any application, and very few applications can maintain 100% scaling across more than dual cores. It’s not because developers are lazy, it’s because there are areas of code that *can’t* be parallelized. Multi-core acceleration is governed by Amdahl’s Law.

ronch

Well, the fact is, as nice as it would be to live in a world where every single programmer can program 1,024 cores to run in perfect multi-threaded unison in his sleep, the fact is, it’s just not that easy. Intel can just as easily cram 128 Atom cores in one piece of silicon and leave all the work to programmers, but they didn’t. They know (as should AMD) that life isn’t like that and they took it upon themselves to design the fastest x86 cores on the planet to take the burden out of programmers’ hands. AMD on the other hand, just designed a core that prioritizes saving die space while maximizing core count, hoping it’ll make up for the lack of IPC with clock speed and hoping programmers will magically figure it out. Well, things didn’t turn out very well in the real world and they’ve been paying the price dearly for the last 5 years.

Mike Pengelly

Yes. I understand your point. But in the real world is should be considered bad practice to not use multithreading. Multithreaded CPUs have been the norm for over 10 years and not a single game engine has been designed for them. A game engine should be in the 90% optimization range not in the below 50% range. 90% if not more of what a game engine does would benefit greatly from being run in parallel. When NASA runs a simulation to determine a flight plan or they do simulation to determine weather patterns or render a movie with 3d effects they use parallel processing so that they can actually compute these things in a realistic amount of time. A game is just a computer simulation at its foundation. The requirements of games should be much lower and it would benefit everyone. Chip manufactures aren’t going to complain because it gives them an excuse to release newer and lazier (on the programming side) chips but in reality even the best games out there don’t utilize even 40% of the computers power. VR is a new product and would benefit even more from parallel processing then a normal game… But they are still using technology based on 15 year old code. This is wrong. It all starts with the game engine… And the game engines are crap. These are suppose to be highly sophisticated products and they charge alot of money for them. And all they do is wait for someone else to solve their optimization problems. From DirectX to chip manufactures. If they don’t have the ability to solve problems them selves they have no business creating a game engine. It’s all about shortcuts and backroom deals with Intel and nvidia to keep from showing the real power of their competitors. It’s why AMD crushes Nvidia when you get an AMD optimized game. Not because AMD is doing anything that is proprietary (unlike Nvidia) its because their hardware is optimized for good programming not bad programming. AMD simply supports the best of the best practices… Which is why DirectX and Vulcan are designed around Mantel which is a properly programmed API. Yes DirectX 11 was harder to optimize for multi threading but I would not classify it as difficult, especially on the CPU side. They just simply are not doing it.

ronch

We can go on and on complaining about programmers, but either AMD keeps on insisting that programmers do a better job or they realize the world’s not perfect and they really need to put out a stronger core, which is what they’re doing already. Yes I know you’re a die hard AMD fanboi but that’s life.

Shahe Ansar

Nope. I program on linux, and multithreaded programming isn’t that hard with exec and fork. Whle it does get slightly confusing with longer programs, using the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) concept makes it easy. The rest depends on the OS.

Tha major problem with most programs is to “scale”… The problem is, spawning too many threads reduces performance (for example- a 100 thread process on a 2 core CPU won’t be effecient). But in this day and age, a 8 thread program should have been taken for granted (and in many cases it is, but gaming isn’t one of them). So yes, programmers are at fault here.

ronch

OK, given their inability to match Intel’s performance these days, they’ll just have to go ahead and recommend their best processors, right? And by ‘best’, I guess AMD can’t just go straight out and say you should get their 220w CPUs which are really nothing more than the good ol’ Vishera die ridiculously pushed to the bleeding edge of physics. Instead, they say anything with 6 or 8 cores and running at around 3.9GHz or so is good. That’s like saying you should just get an 8350 or one of its slight variations.

Joel Hruska

Looking at the list of chips AMD released, the six-core FX-6350 is base-clocked 20% below the FX-9590 and has fewer threads. I’m guessing this means that the FX-6350 is really around the minimal specification for the chip.

There are two ways to read this situation.

1). Oculus has been very conservative with its CPU recommendations. THis means that previous Intel chips will drive VR just fine, possibly including cores all the way back to Nehalem. AMD CPUs will also be just fine, because hey, you don’t need that much CPU horsepower to do it.

2). Oculus hasn’t been very conservative, which means AMD chips and possibly some Intel processors will slip in under the wire. This could mean that some games don’t run well on AMD, or that you need games with DX12 support to play on AMD.

Until we have hardware in-hand, it’s a big guessing game — which is one reason I suggested people wait on pre-ordering the Rift.

ronch

Them recommending a 6-core means DX12 or VR or whatever still hasn’t totally caught up with multithreading. Remember, they want to put their best foot forward with VR given how it’s the Next Big Thing™, and if an 8-core will deliver tangible benefits over 6-core, they’ll likely make sure you will WANT 8 cores (because well, profits). But to recommend a 6-core, either they want to attract even budget buyers (who’ll later realize FX chips aren’t really that great for VR) or, as I’ve said, multithreading isn’t very helpful yet and there’s not much difference between a 6- and an 8-core FX. Of course the GPU will play an even bigger role with VR than it ever has but you’d want a strong CPU to avoid bottlenecks and frame drops.

Adrian Bobek

Or…

3). It is not possibly to make a general recommendation for VR, so Oculus should recommend the highest possible minimum, just for safe.

There is a lot of factor needs to be considered, and there is no good complete recommendation for VR. For example if the game can use AMD TrueAudio, than the 3D audio calculation can be accelerated, so there is no need to use the CPU time for this. A TrueAudio acceleration, especially for reverb can make a huge difference, and a lot slower CPU will be enough to run the VR program.

In my opinion, making a general recommendation for VR is a bad thing when Oculus don’t explain the specific scenarions. There should be a more specific article that explains the vendor specific options/limitations.

Joel Hruska

No game except maybe Thief ever used TrueAudio, AFAIK.

SpaceCat Computers

I’m selling my FX-8350 rig to a buddy for $600 bucks, keeping my i7 2600 rig & then building a new i7-4790k rig

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